A POLITICO-Harvard poll released Friday finds that Democrats and Republicans alike hold the pharmaceutical industry responsible for rising costs more than any other health care sector, though that sentiment is stronger among Democrats.

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On another emerging hot-button issue, Americans favor creating a public option in the Affordable Care Act exchanges — and that’s not just Democrats. A slight majority (54 percent) favors adding a government-sponsored health insurance option — and among Democrats, fully three-quarters back the idea, as do 52 percent of Independents. Among Republicans, 60 percent oppose the public option but more than one in four support it (26 percent).

If Democrats capture the White House and the Senate, this foundation of support would give them an opening to return the public option to the agenda, said Harvard’s Robert Blendon, an expert on health policy and political analysis who led the research team that designed the POLITICO-Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll.

Democrats, including President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, have been rallying around the idea as a way to bolster insurer competition in the Obamacare exchanges, although it proved politically untenable when the ACA was being drafted in 2009 and they jettisoned it. Democratic moderates are still wary today.

The focus on drugs as the big problem in health costs show that months of glaring headlines — as well as personal sticker shock experiences — have had an impact on public opinion. The pharmaceutical industry has attributed the problem to a handful of outliers, but the poll results suggest that when people see Martin Shkreli raising the price of an AIDS drug by 5,000 percent, or Mylan jacking up EpiPens to $600 a pair, they aren’t seeing bad actors but the face of a profit-hungry industry.

In past surveys, Blendon said, people tended to blame insurance companies or physicians. But now, he said, “people have a high level of concern about health care costs, and at the moment, pharma is villain number one.”

How Americans feel the pinch of drug costs reflect other changes in health care, particularly the larger co-pays and deductibles that make patients have more “skin in the game.” The poll found 43 percent of Americans are “very or somewhat” worried about medical costs in the coming year, and the top concern (31 percent) is their out-of-pocket costs. Worries about affordability remain high even though under the ACA, the uninsured rate has plummeted to a historic low of 8.6 percent, according to the latest CDC data.

"There's no question it's having an impact," Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for PhRMA, said of the publicity around drug prices. "National conversations about Martin Shkreli — while not representative of the pharmaceutical industry — impacts on how people see this issue.”

Big out-of-pocket spending for drugs, including in high-deductible Obamacare plans, has also shifted perception of drug prices, he added.

Overall, when asked how much they blame different groups for the high cost of health care, 70 percent of those surveyed cited prescription drug companies, followed by 60 percent identifying insurers, and 53 percent said the federal government.

Broken down by party, 74 percent of Democrats pointed to drug makers, and 68 percent of Republicans cited the federal government as the top culprit. Still, even among the GOP, 61 percent called out drug companies as a big part of the problem.

The survey also found that Americans remain lukewarm about the ACA — one reason for their openness about the public option, which many see as a way of strengthening the law. They aren’t enthused about how Obamacare has performed, but they don’t want it repealed.

Polling by CBS-New York Times back in 2009 found a similar level of support for the public option, 59 percent.

Clinton has endorsed a version of the public option, though it would probably be limited to states with scant market competition on the exchanges. Donald Trump isn’t championing any such thing; he’s promising to repeal the ACA and replace it with an approach he has not yet spelled out, although he recently promised on the Dr. Oz Show that “it will be a beautiful thing to see.”

Finally, Americans remain divided on how well the ACA is working — 47 percent say it’s working well, and 47 say it’s working poorly. That tracks with numerous other surveys showing that views of the health law have been pretty evenly divided from its enactment more than six years ago.

Digging deeper into survey results, though, a partisan schism becomes clear. Nearly three-quarters of Republicans (71 percent) say Obamacare is working “very poorly,” more than twice as many as Democrats (34 percent) who say it’s working “very well.” That, too, has been a pattern from the start; Republican dislike for the law is more intense than Democrats’ embrace.

The POLITICO Pro-Harvard poll was conducted by independent research company SSRS from Aug. 31 to Sept. 4 among a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.